Education Feature: 'Student Day in the Life: Adrian Sandoval'

Author: by Beth A.

Today's Gamasutra educational feature, part of the expanded Gamasutra Education section of the site, shares the typical routine of Adrian Sandoval, a student in Camden County College's major in Game Design and Development. Sandoval goes into his role in his development team in following extract: "Now that each member of the team breaks off to work on their own individual part of the game, my goal is to talk with each of them and see what they were working on. Before I do that, I talk with the other game designer on the team. At the beginning of the semester, he came up with the concept, and I agreed to help work out the mechanics, puzzles, and level design. The game he came up with was Post Mortem Combat, a game which pokes fun at the time we've spent at the college. It's a first person adventure which stars the members of our team as we fight to save the world from an alien menace which is lead by our professor. Considering I've spent a good two years of my life at this school and this is the biggest project I'll complete there, it feels like the perfect student thesis, so I jumped at the chance to flesh it out. Over the first few weeks, it was our job to work on the Game Design Document, or GDD. This document basically covered every aspect of the game, including the story, levels, and mechanics. There were also sections for other members of the team, including an art bible for our concept art and an engine overview which documented the hurdles that the programming team will have to go over. In the end, the document turned out to be about 80 pages long. Now that the document is out of the way, we make sure that everything stays as it was written in the original GDD, as well as flesh out some of the puzzles and obstacles players will face within the individual levels." You can read the full Gamasutra educational feature on the topic to get filled in on Sandoval's day (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).